Who watches the Watchmen?

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sei
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby sei » Sat Oct 10, 2015 11:44 pm

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Oct 11, 2015 3:41 am

The past decade has brought me around to the opinion that, given the chance, any society's elites will attempt bring back outright slavery if they can.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Grath » Sun Oct 11, 2015 10:15 am

Mongrel wrote:The past decade has brought me around to the opinion that, given the chance, any society's elites will attempt bring back outright slavery if they can.

They already have, it's called for-profit prison system and the war on drugs.

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Sun Oct 11, 2015 11:53 am

Who says it ever went away?
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Thu Oct 15, 2015 12:58 pm

Confirming what anyone knows already, apparently the NSA and probably Russia have broken the encryption used by a large percentage of the internet.

It's been explained to me that the fix is fairly trivial, but that ignores the fact that they've already had access to pretty much anything they want for years. Or that this is an arms race which can only continue.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Thu Nov 12, 2015 10:20 pm

Alvaro Bedoya: The dystopian present

(Bedoya is Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy and to Senator Al Franken, and is also the director of the Georgetown Law's Centre for Privacy Law).

Unfortunately Bedoya has chosen to rather awkwardly share this via a series of ten tweets, so the summary is as follows
There's an advertisement service sold by a company called SilverPush, which has no privacy statement or policy of any sort, that emits noise from your web browser and from television ads at a frequency inaudible to humans which many smart phones have undisclosed apps constantly listening for, to track your identity between your web browsing, smart phone use, and television watching.

On top of all that, the service is called PRISM. Fucking PRISM.

This is actually a real thing and not a movie plot. Links to sources and information filings are provided in the Tweets.

To be "fair", it's well worth noting that this doesn't seem to actually be particularly effective - but even so, Jesus Fucking Christ what the fuck.

EDIT:

As far as information on which smartphones have this program installed (since it appears that only smartphones are performing the listening portion of this), it appears that this present in ad SDK bundle. Which is meaningless to a lay dope like me, so to put it even simpler than that, it means your phone will listen whenever you use an app which serves ads using that bundle. This also (apparently) means that installing an ad blocker on your phone may be an effective countermeasure.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Fri Dec 04, 2015 3:43 pm

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby LaserBeing » Fri Dec 04, 2015 7:18 pm

Interesting read, but more importantly the guy who wrote it looks like Otacon which I find oddly apropos

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Thad » Wed Dec 16, 2015 6:02 pm

Ars: Senate probing whether Cruz leaked classified surveillance data during debate

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said Wednesday he was investigating if Texas Senator Ted Cruz released classified surveillance data at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate.

The probe concerns what Cruz said during a back-and-forth talk with Florida Senator Marco Rubio about the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed in June. Cruz said that, under that law, "nearly 100 percent" of phone calling metadata can be surveilled with the new spy program compared with "20 percent to 30 percent" under the Patriot Act provisions that the USA Freedom Act replaced.


That...actually sounds like something where I would be on Cruz's side. Up until the point where it turns out he was actually being complimentary when he talked about the USA Freedom Act's (possibly classified) expanded surveillance powers.

The issue concerns land lines versus mobile phone and Internet-based phones. Here's what Cruz said about the USA Freedom Act:

It strengthened the tools of national security and law enforcement to go after terrorists. It gave us greater tools and we are seeing those tools work right now in San Bernardino. And in particular, what it did is the prior program only covered a relatively narrow slice of phone calls. When you had a terrorist, you could only search a relatively narrow slice of numbers, primarily land lines. The USA Freedom Act expands that so now we have cell phones, now we have Internet phones, now we have the phones that terrorists are likely to use and the focus of law enforcement is on targeting the bad guys.


Rubio eventually responded. "I don’t think national television in front of 15 million people is the place to discuss classified information."


So, pretty much everyone's an asshole in this story.

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mothra » Thu Dec 17, 2015 1:18 am

Uuuuhhhhhhgggggg

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Thad » Sun Feb 21, 2016 2:30 am

Judge rules EFF can conduct discovery in its case against the NSA.

This marks the first time a party has been allowed to gather factual evidence from the NSA in a case involving the agency’s warrantless surveillance. The government had fought all our requests to proceed with this lawsuit, arguing that the state secrets privilege protects it against both discovery and liability.

[...]

This is an important step forward to lifting the cloak of secrecy that has thus far shielded the NSA from judicial scrutiny, and EFF looks forward to finally getting to the nuts and bolts of this extraordinarily important lawsuit.

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby sei » Wed Feb 24, 2016 1:32 am

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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 02, 2016 1:07 am

Vice: The Apple-FBI Encryption Hearing Was Unexpectedly Hostile to the FBI Director

Good. Fuck that fucking guy.

I heard him on the radio today saying that if Apple provided fbiOS it could still keep it out of the wrong hands, adding that "iCloud isn't encrypted and I haven't heard of it being hacked." To which I shouted something at my car's dashboard about Jennifer Lawrence.

Nice to hear Zoe Lofgren called him on that exact fucking thing.

Even that fuck Issa quoting that fuck Scalia seems to be on the right side of this one. Lawmakers may not understand computers, but it sounds like they may finally be starting to understand how the FBI works.



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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Mongrel » Sat Mar 12, 2016 4:03 pm

As I posted in my long-winded Obama critique, shit like this is the single biggest reason I cannot have an overall positive opinion on him as a leader.

Seriously, fuck that shit.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Friday » Sat Mar 12, 2016 4:35 pm

“If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer?” Mr. Obama said. “How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?”


WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDREEEEEEEEEEEEEN also Terrorists

fucks sake, Obama. You sound like a fucking parody sketch.
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Friday » Sat Mar 12, 2016 4:39 pm

The year is 4054. The United West Confederacy is in it's 300th year since the devastating war with the Autonomous Robotic Union.

President Cyfelion strides to the stage on his bio-enhanced mecha rocket legs.

"If technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable brain-core, where the encryption is so strong that there is no key, there is no door into the thoughts of a citizen at all, then how do we apprehend the guy thinking about child pornography?” Mr. Cyfelion says. “How do we disrupt a terrorist plot?”
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Friday » Sat Mar 12, 2016 4:46 pm

The year is 5439. The Global Galactic Federation is in it's 20th year since the War with the Last Free-Willed rebels.

Lord-Commander Darek Kyl strides to the stage, crushing several babies with his Cyber-saur legs.

"I know you drones want Free Will back, we read it in your subconscious REM cycles while you sleep," he says. "But if it is possible for a citizen to make his own choices, then how do we suppress all CHILD PORNOGRAPHY. TERRORISM. END BROADCAST."
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Re: Who watches the Watchmen?

Postby Thad » Sat Mar 12, 2016 5:26 pm

I'm partial to Doctorow's headline: Obama: cryptographers who don't believe in magic ponies are "fetishists," "absolutists"

Obama's SXSW appearance included the president's stupidest-ever remarks on cryptography: he characterized cryptographers' insistence that there is no way to make working cryptography that stops working when the government needs it to as "phone fetishizing," as opposed to, you know, reality.

In a rhetorical move that he would have flunked his U Chicago law students for, Obama described a landscape with two edges: "Strong crypto" and "No crypto" and declared that in the middle was a reasonable territory in which crypto could strong sometimes and disappear the rest of the time.

This is like the territory in which you are "Pregnant" or "Not pregnant" where, in between, you are "a little bit pregnant" (or, of course, like "Vaccinations are safe," vs "Vaccinations cause autism" whose middle ground is "Vaccinations are safe, but just to be sure, let's not give 'too many' at once, because reasons, and nevermind that this will drastically increase cost and complexity and reduce compliance").

Obama conflated cryptographers' insistence that his plan was technically impossible with the position that government should never be able to serve court orders on its citizens. This math denialism, the alternative medicine of information security.

He focused his argument on the desirability of having crypto that worked in this impossible way, another cheap rhetorical trick. Wanting it badly isn't enough.

If decades of attending SXSW (I leave for the airport in 30 minutes!) has taught me anything, it's that someone will be selling or giving away "phone fetishist" tees with PGP sourcecode on one side and a magic pony on the other before the week is out.

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